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What they died for, what they vote for

Posted Tuesday evening, September 26, 2017.

Cemetery Ridge, Gettysburg Battlefield, “The HIgh-Water Mark of the Confederacy,” looking down into the field where Pickett’s division made its charge on July 3, 1863. According to a Virginia State Senator, no Confederate soldier died that day to protect the right of a privileged few to own other human beings. Photo courtesy of the Seattle Times.

As you've probably heard, they're having a special election down in Alabama to fill the Senate sat Jeff Sessions vacated to become U.S. Attorney General. Today's the Republican primary runoff, which means today likely decides things, the general election in December in which the winner of the primary faces off against a Democrat is regarded as a formality, I think, with the Democrat standing pretty much no chance.

Like I would know. I'm not there. But from here it looks like the primary fight is between two Right Wing Republicans with different styles but no meaningful political differences. One, Luther Strange, who happens to be the sitting senator, having been appointed by the governor when Sessions resigned, appears to have the better manners and know how to comport himself in polite society. The other, Judge Roy Moore, is a loud, proud bigot and kook who has shown contempt for polite society, contempt for the law, contempt for the Constitution---which he interprets as if it was written specifically with him in mind, Hamilton having concluded every one of his Federalist papers with "But let's hold off for 220 years until we see what Judge Moore thinks."---contempt for everybody who isn't his brand of Christian, contempt for anyone who isn't straight, white, and male, contempt, in short, for anyone who isn't Roy Moore, and he doesn't care who knows it.

Oddly, our Mr President Trump has endorsed the guy with good manners who knows how to curb his tongue or at least tone-down his rhetoric. That's what last week's moment on the balcony down there was ostensibly for: the President was stumping for Strange. Point kind of got lost in the midst of Trump's usual crowing about himself, his continuing to try to incite a nuclear war with North Korea, and his stirring up resentment among middle-aged and elderly white men who are past it, if they ever had it, against a young, rich, talented black man for acting on the principle that cops should not be able to kill black people at will. But no racism there. It's all about respecting the flag.

But despite having Trump's endorsement, and despite his being the incumbent, odds are Strange is going to lose to Moore. There are probably local reasons for this. But it's likely that Moore is ahead because he's the one most like Trump, and I don't mean in his being the more traditionally populist, although I'm sure that's a factor too.

Within certain precincts of Liberaltown, there's a nostalgic longing for a revivial of populism that ignores the fact that in the United States the only brand of populism with lasting import is Southern Populism, angry, divisive, and racist.

Fundamental to populism's appeal is the notion that it's not the People's fault. It's theirs. So a certain amount of scapegoating is a part of the mix. Some them or thems must be identified and excoriated and made objects of the People's wrath. When them is the bankers---and the politicians and business people and the lawyers who defend them and the intellectual elites who excuse them---the People are usually justified in their anger and their desire for revenge. Somehow, though, it never seems to stop with the bankers.

Those people are almost always a part of them. And the more hated part, to the point that the bankers often get forgotten.

"Drain the swamp" clearly means run those people's political allies out of town on a rail so that only white people like us are in charge again.

Those people are brown and black skinned, generally. But those people also include Jews.

The racism and the religious bigotry can be muted if not excised. Huey Long did it.

I don't think Huey Long is the best role model for contemporary progressivism.

This brings up another flaw in populist movements. They quickly center around a cult of personality.

I don't know how Roy Moore feels about it. He's obviously comfortable being a "personality". But I haven't seen any evidence he's interested in leading a movement. Doesn't mean the evidence isn't there. It may well be, I'm just not there to see it, like I said.

The point, though, isn't that Moore's the better populist or any kind of populist compared to Strange. The point is that he is the more typically Republican.

Trump carried Alabama with 62.9 percent of the vote. It shouldn't come as a surprise that people who are fine with having a bumptious idiot and outspoken bigot as their President are fine with having another one as their Senator, and it's easy to conclude, as I appear to above, that Moore is winning because he is like Trump. But I think that gets it backwards. Trump is like him.

And both are like a great many other Republican politicians, from the most local level on up through the United States Congress, and all of them are like the Republicans who make up the base.

State Sen. Dick Black (R-13th) says no Confederate soldiers died fighting for slavery, a comment described by a George Mason University scholar as “at the very least, a misleading overstatement.”

The local lawmaker's statement, sent in an email to Republican colleagues, comes amid a national discussion about race, symbolism and the propriety of Confederate monuments in public places in modern-day America.

One such monument stands in the center of Leesburg, the largest town in Virginia and the seat of the fastest-growing county in the South. The statue is placed on county property next to the Loudoun County Courthouse.

Black represents a portion of Leesburg and Loudoun County.

The senator, in an email obtained by the Times-Mirror, says he opposes efforts to “cede authority to localities” in terms of deciding the fate of monuments. “That's just code for tearing them down,” he says.

“None of those soldiers fought to defend slavery,” Black wrote. “Soldiers don't serve for things like that -- trust me, I know. Imagine the men of Picket's Charge thinking, 'I'm virtually certain to die in this attack, but I take solace in defending slavery.' Give me a break.”

In the larger scheme of things, a state senator from Virginia, particularly one who according to Wikipedia, holds no leadership positions, doesn't wield a lot of clout. But Black---and let's all take a minute to chuckle over the irony of his last name---has been energetic in leading other Right Wingers in the Virginia General Assembly in opposition to Virginia's taking the Medicaid expansion money the ACA offers states and in that he's been influential in the Republicans' national effort to sabotage Obamacare. If every state had taken the money, the GOP would be having an even harder time mustering the votes for repeal.

It can be argued that if they'd taken the money, the Democrats would still control the Senate and Hillary would have won. The Republicans themselves believe this. It's the reason for the years of obstruction and sabotage. It's why they're so desperate to pass Graham-Cassidy. It's why they won't give up even if it fails this week. They’re afraid that when holdout governors and state legislators see that the cause is finally lost, they'll say, What the hell, and take the money. At which point, President Obama wins.

As Orrin Hatch said, once you get people on the dole, you can't get them off.

Or as Democrats would say, once people know they can see the doctor when they're sick, their kids won't die of treatable diseases, and their elderly parents won't be kicked out of nursing homes and hospitals, they might come to think having affordable access to health care is a good thing.

So Black isn't an insignificant crank, although he is a crank. But that's the point. Crank that he is, Black is representative of the Republican base nationally. The Republicans have been the party of cranks for decades.

What's more, his apology on behalf of the common soldiers of the Confederate army is reflective of the wider Conservative apology for the Confederacy. The Rebels weren't fighting to defend (let alone expand) slavery. The Lost Cause was a noble cause.

Now, we ought to be able to trust Black when it comes to his knowing how troops in combat think. I mean, he ought to know. He certainly ought to know better than I do. He's a veteran. He served in Vietnam. As a Marine.

He was a pilot not a grunt. But he was a helicopter pilot and you know what they went through during that goddamn war. Black flew 269 combat missions and earned a Purple Heart.

From 11 February to 17 June 1967, he served as Forward Air Controller for the 1st Marine Regiment. He made 70 combat patrols in the jungle, with the 1st Marine Regiment. He engaged in intense combat around Nui Loc Son in April 1967…He received the Navy Commendation Medal with “V” for valor, while serving as Forward Air Controller for 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment. Lt. Black volunteered to join Fox Company, 1st Marines, which held the ridgeline at Nui Loc Son—an extremely dangerous and remote outpost in the Que Son Valley. There, he participated in the bloodiest campaign of the entire Vietnam War.

Like all Marines, Black volunteered. He signed up in 1963. John Kennedy was still alive. Black himself may not have joined because he was inspired by JFK to pay any price, suffer any burden to assure the survival and success of liberty, but an awful lot of his fellow Marines did. They may not have known they were going to end up fighting Communists in Vietnam, but they knew there was a good chance they'd be fighting Communists somewhere, Soviets, Chinese, Cuban, North Korean, whoever. They would be fighting to protect America and the American way of life. They were fighting for freedom and democracy. When they got to Vietnam, they'd have seen their job as helping to stop the tide of Communist aggression and save the people of South Vietnam from totalitarianism. If Black didn't know that, he must have been the only Marine who didn't.

One of the themes of The Vietnam War has been how quickly being in the war wore down Americans' idealism. It wasn't long before the most idealistic soldier or Marine was fighting just to live out his tour and make it home.

The process became quicker and more embittering as America's involvement deepened, to the point that the later waves of troops arrived already suspecting they were being sent to die fighting for nothing except the vanity of old men back in Washington and the career advancement of certain generals.

"No nineteen year old wants to die to maintain the credibility of Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon," one marine vet tells the camera.

But even among that first wave that included young Lieutenant Black, disillusionment, cynicism, fatalism, and the pragmatic will to survive took hold swiftly, and it may be that's what Black is remembering when he talks about Confederate soldiers, projecting, reasonably, his own experience onto them.

And he is probably right. Very few of those men marched up that hill to Cemetery Ridge that afternoon thinking how proud they were, fighting to defend their peculiar institution. They had too much else of immediate importance to fight for.

They were exhausted, hungry, battle weary, and footsore. They were fighting to get up the top of the hill where they hoped they could scrounge good shoes and a decent mea and maybe some sleep. They were fighting for revenge for the friends who'd been killed on their way up the hill. They were fighting to live to fight another day.

But that doesn't mean they didn't think about it at other times. When they weren't fighting, around the campfire, on the march, it may not have been constantly on their minds, but the subject would have come up.

They'd have had news from home. They'd have read newspapers and magazines, They'd have talked to each other about more than just the girls they left behind. Not every private was a poor country lad. There were aristocrats in the ranks. But even those who were small farmers would have owned slaves, if only one or two or three. The shopkeepers among them, if they didn't own slaves themselves---although it's as likely as not they did. Domestic servants being members of almost every middle class household, North and South, just in the slave states those servants weren't free---their customers did. They knew how their livelihoods---their way of life---was dependent on slavery.

And it was not a new debate. They'd have grown up hearing arguments about the evils of abolition and listening to horror stories about slave rebellions. Many would have voted in the Presidential election and few of them would have voted for Abraham Lincoln. If the South didn't think the argument centered around slavery, the North did, and it made that clear. By the time Pickett's division reached Gettysburg, the Emancipation Proclamation had been in effect for nearly half a year.

Whatever their own thoughts and feelings might have been, they'd have known that slavery was central to whatever it was they were expected to die fighting for. And they'd also have known that other people---other Southerners even, didn't see slavery's continuance as a cause worth fighting and dying for. They'd have had to come to terms with that knowledge.

But it doesn't matter what they thought they were fighting for. It doesn't matter what their officers thought, although most of the South's officer corps, like the North's, was drawn from the aristocracy and in the South that meant by definition slavers and they knew what it meant for them economically if the South lost. It doesn't even matter what the generals thought. It matters what the politicians who sent them to fight thought and they were clear about that.

They sent them to fight and die to defend slavery and treason.

But more broadly they sent them to die to protect their own place at the top of the economic and social order from where they could lord it over everyone below, white and black, supposedly free men and slaves.

For all the South's century and a half preening about states' rights, the Confederacy was formed to protect a landed gentry's right to claim ownership of other human beings. In other words, the Confederacy was an aristocracy.

The Civil War was fought over the of whether the country belonged to the all the people or only a privileged few.

That's the argument the country started from. It's at the root of the argument we've been having with ourselves ever since. The Constitution begins by stating that the People were uniting to establish a government of, by, and for themselves and to share the benefits that would result from their more perfect union, but debate began immediately over who would be included among the People.

The liberal answer is everybody. The conservative response is a privileged few.

Over the course of two hundred and thirty years, the liberals have had the better of the debate, and the definition of the People has expanded and the benefits of being one of the People have been extended and the opportunities to share in those benefits and the rights necessary to having those opportunities have been extended along with them.

This of course has not come about easily or swiftly or steadily or without setbacks and defeats. The forces of conservatism have opposed it vehemently every step of the way, with whatever power and ferocity they could muster, including, it goes without saying, tearing the country apart and plunging us into a bloody civil war. They're still at it. It's at the heart of their determination to kill the ACA. When they say there is no right to health care, they mean there is no right to health care for anybody but the privileged few.

The notion that the People are a privileged few is what unites the three sects of the Republican Party. The Religious Right think they’re privileged because they’re the only true Christians. The Angry White Working Class which is not all that Working Class but is most definitely white think they’re the People or the only people who should have any say in how the country is run because they’re the only true Americans, the only ones who work and pay taxes, the ones who live in the real America, the small towns and suburbs of the South and Middle West, and, oh, incidentally, because they’re white. The corporatists think, damn “the People” we have all the money so we’re the ones in charge.

The corporatists own and run the Republican Party. The other two sects are the hired help, but don’t tell them that.

This is why Black matters. It’s why it doesn’t matter who wins the runoff in Alabama. They’re all in it together to turn back the calendar to the days when they were all the People counted and they had all the rights and all the privileges and benefits of living here belonged to them.

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Lance:
You brushed up against one reason I believe, without a lot of evidence, that Southern men went off to fight for slavery, when you mentioned "the girls they left behind". General Armistead, who led that charge to the grove of trees said "Remember your wives, your sweethearts..."
I think that they marched and fought to keep the black men down, and (in the words of Eisenhower to Warren) "keep them away from their daughters"

I think it's pretty likely that the southern soldiers were fighting out of regional loyalty, and there was also a significant aspect of coercion due to conscription laws. But the southern army fought in the service of white supremacy and slavery--this is precisely what southern leaders said before hand, and the army was in the service of the leaders--Jeff Davis, Lee, et al. The curse of racial prejudice infected the whole county, north and south, and still does (see Trump's war on the uppity black players in the NFL).